Para Siempre Jamás (y tangente)

The other night during dinner, I saw an advertisement on TV for that channel´s Wednesday night movie -- it was going to play "Ever After"!. Ever After is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I promptly made plans to watch it with my friends. Thus, last night, Wolfang, Andrea, Geronimo, y Yo (err, and I) got together and watched it. Having seen it close to a half a dozen times in English, I had no problem understanding it in Spanish -- at several points I stopped to ask questions when I noticed that phrases weren´t exact translations. The most embarassing part was that at one of the sappy points, I actually had a single tear appear in my eye. (Ever After is one of the only movies I´ve ever legitimately cried it, when I was 16, babysitting on a snowy Valentine´s Day, because I didn´t have any romance in my life.) No one noticed, though, (well, I told Wolfang, so that he would laugh at me) so it was ok.

Also last night, I looked exceptionally cute, because I got my roommate to do my hair. Geronimo commented on it almost immediately "wow, Carrrrroline" said Geronimo. "You look...Spanish today! Your outfit, your hairstyle, your much improved speaking ability...it´s like you´re not American anymore. Well, except that you´re still wearing sandals." I didn´t particuarly believe him, so I turned to Wolfang and asked if I really did look Spanish. "No, because you still have blond hair" teased Wolfang. But, in adorable news, this morning we were chatting on Facebook, and immediately after saying "hola", Wolfang said (in English) "yesterday you are beautiful (o algo asi)." I melted just a little, I´ll admit it...before correcting his grammar.

(Note to readers: You should not take this statement as either a confirmation or a denial of any flirtatious activity between Wolfang and I.)

The awesomest thing about yesterday, though, was the presentation of a girl in my grammar class. She did it on the situation of women in Morocco, the same topic I had written a blog entry on a couple of weeks ago. (If you haven´t, you should go back and read the fascinating response Hassan wrote). At the end of the presentation, though, she made the claim that the obvious oppression of women in Morocco was all Islam´s fault. Even though I understood her sentiment completely, I had to rise to the defense of Islam because...well, that´s what I do. So while the rest of the class critized various aspects of the religion, I rapidly defended then, resulting in a highly spirited conversation. After class was over, I apologized to the girl -- I was worried she was annoyed that I had challenged her -- but happily she said that no, she was fascinated by what I was saying. Then we switched to English and chattered for more than an hour about the history of Islam and it´s conflicts with modernism. I later discovered she had skipped her next class to talk to me, because she felt like she learned more from me than from her culture class. That embarassed me a little bit -- I don´t advocate class-skippage -- but at the same time I absolutely LOVED our conversation. I haven´t had anyone to have such deep historical conversations with in months. Or, if I had, I´ve been unable to express all of those complexities because my Spanish isn´t good enough.

I´m so excited to go back to school!! (I mean, yes I´m in school right now, but...Bloomington school.)